Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Ruth Pinch's Beef-Steak Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the paste
Mix the flour and suet (or butter) in a bowl.
Add ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt and mix well.
Moisten the mixture with the well-beaten yolks of four eggs or three whole eggs mixed with a little water.
Assemble and steam
Butter a basin very thickly before laying in the paste.
Place the rump steak in the basin and season with ⅛ oz salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper.
Pour in ½ pint of water.
Cover the basin and steam for 3 hours.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together50,459 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Forms the structure of the pastry that encloses the filling.
- Suet
- Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and rich as it steams.
- Eggs
- Bind the paste and add richness and structure to the crust.
- Rump steak
- Provides the meat filling that becomes tender during long steaming.
The step that matters
Cover the basin and steam for 3 hours. Steaming must stay gentle and steady over the full time so the meat becomes tender and the paste cooks through without drying out. Lost steam lowers the temperature and slows cooking.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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